Round-up from this week: Open-Xchange, Liaise, Zimbra and more

It’s been a busy week. As a result, I haven’t been able to cover all the news that I would have liked to. Because of this, I thought it would be a good idea to write a combined post that outlines the news from this week that I failed to cover.

First out is Open-Xchange, who hit a major milestone this week — 15 million users. This is an increase in their user base by 80 percent in 2009. Great job guys! Yet, you still got quite a steep climb until you reach Zimbra with it’s 40 million users.

While on the topic of Zimbra, the Sunnyvale based company just announced two new releases this week: 6.0.4 and 5.0.21. No really exciting changes can be found in the changelog, other than perhaps an improvement in the Exchange Migration Wizard and Advanced Search Actions.

The Horde Project also had a few announcements this week. They released version 1.2.5 of their Groupware. In addition to numerous bugfixes, we also find that a translation to Croatian has been added. Since the Horde Groupware is based on individual components that can be used independently, there were also a number of announcements made in regards to them. If you’re interested in a particular component, here’s a list of direct links to their respective changelog:

• Kronolith H3 (2.3.3) – The calendar application
• Ingo H3 (1.2.3) – The email filter manager application
• MIMP H3 (1.1.3) – The mobile internet messaging application
• Mnemo H3 (2.2.3) – The notes manager
• DIMP H3 (1.1.4) – Dynamic Internet Messaging Program
• IMP H3 (4.3.6) – The webmail application
• Nag H3 (2.3.4) – The task list manager
• Turba H3 (2.3.3) – The contact manager

Horde Groupware

Another email related news that have made it to a lot of different tech-sites this week is the public launch of Liaise. The general idea behind Liaise is to ‘turn words into action.’ The way it accomplishes this is trough an Outlook-plugin that analyzes the content of your messages. If you type or receive an email with the line similar to “we need to take care of this today,” Liaise will interpret it as an action and create an entry for it.

Personally I’m not fully convinced about the usefulness of Liaise. Yes, it sounds like a good idea on paper, but I’m not sure that the AI in their software is intelligent enough to capture all data and actions in an email. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because I wouldn’t switch to Outlook regardless.

Liaise in action

If you’re curious about Liaise, there’s a pretty good screencast that outlines how it works available here.

Other interesting announcement from this week:

• Finally a ‘remove duplicate contacts’ feature in Gmail
• Hushmail radically increases storage for premium users
• threadsy gets an update. Adds MobileMe and Chrome support.
• French military turns Thunderbird into Trustedbird